Microsoft today unveiled new tools in its worldwide market leading e-mail service, Windows Live Hotmail, at simultaneous events on the east and west coasts. The new tools are designed to make it easier for users to unsubscribe from unwanted mailing lists and keep their inboxes tidy.

Among Webmail providers, Hotmail seems to be most aggressively attacking the problem of what the company calls "graymail"—email that isn't bad enough to be spam but can clutter your inbox, making it harder to find what you really need.

The company also announced an Android App for Hotmail, completing the ecosystem of mobile access to the Webmail service. The app is now available from the Android Market, and offers push email, synced calendar and folders, sending photos from phone cameras, multiple account support, and sending, receiving, and viewing of attachments. There's a small irony in Microsoft making an app for Google's mobile platform, since Google makes the biggest threat to Hotmail—Gmail.

Microsoft director Brian Hall spoke with a select group of tech journalists on the west side of Manhattan, while corporate vice president Chris Jones spoke to a group of reporters in San Francisco. The message was the same, however: Hotmail gets an unfair rap as a slow, old-fashioned, spam-ridden email service with small attachment size limits.

Hall acknowledged that this may have been the case in 2006, but that Microsoft has subsequently invested in Hotmail significantly in the intervening years. He noted that since that low point, the Webmail site has sped up tenfold overall, and is up to 22 times faster at some common operations. Spam has gone from about 35 percent of the inbox contents to less than 3 percent. And attachments are nearly unlimited, with individual attachments up to 100MB allowed.

Hall noted that "storage just isn't an issue anymore," pointing to one user who had over 30GB of content in his Hotmail account. The company now stores over 140 petabytes of data, up from less than 20 in mid-2007.

Out with Graymail!The meat of today's announcement involved new tools designed to combat graymail and keep inboxes more organized. Hotmail already offered the well-received Mailbox Sweep feature, which lets users check an email and move all mail from the same address out of the Inbox or delete it, including any future emails. This release tops that with Scheduled sweeps, which let you specify an expiration date for mail from a specified sender, or just keep the latest email.—handy for limited time offers.

Hotmail will also automatically detect if an email is a newsletter, and let you Sweep it to a subfolder or delete it automatically. You can unsubscribe from a newsletter right from the inbox; Microsoft will complete the process for you if the newsletter offers a mechanism for that, and simple block it if not.

Also new are Instant Actions. These appear as buttons when you hover the mouse cursor over a message entry, letting you delete, flag, mark read, or Sweep the message without going through menus. The Actions are customizable so, for example, you could create a custom folder to send messages to via an Instant Action. "If you're 'filer' or a 'deleter,' you'll definitely find these things useful. But even if you're a 'piler'—someone who lets email pile up—there's still a lot of value for this," said Hotmail's principal program manager lead Mike Schackwitz.

Hotmail has for a while offered Categories, which automatically detect and categorize mail concerned with social network updates or those that contain Office documents or photos. With today's release, you'll be able to create your own categories, such as "Family" by specifying addresses. Folders now can be dragged and dropped for easier re-arrangement.

The new features start rolling out to users today and will reach all Hotmail users by year's end. For a closer look at Microsoft's webmail service, read our full review of Hotmail and see the slideshow above.

About the Author

Michael Muchmore is PC Magazine's lead analyst for software and web applications. A native New Yorker, he has at various times headed up PC Magazine's coverage of Web development, enterprise software, and display technologies. Michael cowrote one of the first overviews of web services for a general audience. Before that he worked on PC Magazine's S... See Full Bio

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